This proposal describes our vision and mission for the OriginTrail community and provides a detailed description of how we intend to kickstart a thriving OriginTrail community.
Community is King
Community is king! Community members play a crucial role in the development of crypto projects - they’ll review products, offer insights, and highlight market trends. Engaged communities act as an advocate on social media and drive engagement from new members by explaining product offerings and answering questions.
Increasingly, the success of a protocol/blockchain is reliant on the cohesion and interactiveness of its community. A community’s end goal is also pretty straightforward: Get your coin into the hands of as many people as possible and make those holders so exceptionally excited about your project that they tell everyone they know. However, the million-dollar question is “how do we get there?”
Tracers Unite
The OriginTrail Decentralized Knowledge Graph (DKG) is eating the world! For those of us that are deeply invested in the ecosystem and community, this becomes more clear by the day. It’s not a question if it will happen, but when.
However, it seems that the broader crypto community - and members inside our active community that are not that tech-savvy - are still having a hard time grasping the scope of what Trace Labs, Trace Alliance, and OriginTrail are trying to achieve. OriginTrail is often perceived by outsiders as just another hyped supply chain project tracking chickens or as a VeChain competitor without truly understanding the unique and fundamental value propositions the protocol offers. Most people outside our community bubble have not even heard of OriginTrail, despite it being around longer than most other crypto projects.
And frankly, you can’t blame them. In an ecosystem that is mainly driven by hype, tribalism, memes, and easy to market narratives, it is very difficult for a complex business-to-business (B2B) project like OriginTrail to stand out. Generally speaking, there is still a massive disconnect between the fundamental value of these types of projects and fair price valuations inside the crypto ecosystem.
While lurking around our community channels, I mostly sense a ‘wait and see’ attitude and a really strong focus on what the Trace Labs team is [not] doing. Some argue that creating more awareness for OriginTrail inside the general crypto community is purely a job for Trace Labs, core developers of the protocol (wen marketing?). While this was maybe true in the early stages of protocol development, I would argue we have reached an important tipping point.
First, people should understand that the dynamics of a B2B company and the marketing strategies are completely different than in the B2C sector. I work as a Product Owner in a B2B software company in the healthcare sector where stakeholder management is a pain and most deals move slower than a turtle. I admire what Trace Labs is getting done! As everyone has seen over the past few months, they are killing it with partner acquisitions, stakeholder management and protocol development.
However, this growth also means ruthless prioritization and a laser focus on executing the right strategy. I can imagine that marketing and raising awareness inside the crypto ecosystem is pretty low for Trace Labs. And to be blunt, why would they? Seen through the lens of Trace Labs that would be like “marketing cars to people without a driver's license.” I would rather have them focus 100% on forging new partnerships (read: increasing adoption) and developing the tech than spreading their already scarce resources too thin.
Yes, there has been some strides in that direction recently by putting the knowledge graph front and center, release of the new website, and a new explainer video. However, the Trace Labs team can't or won't capitalize on every opportunity the community might be interested in for various strategic, time-related, or legal reasons. We, as a community, need our own platform to complement the Trace Labs initiatives!
That's why I propose to set up a community fund and initiate "Project One", a community-led project, which will lay the first foundational bricks towards our mission to build an accessible and open-source knowledge hub for and by the community. This will be a place where Tracers can connect, collaborate, contribute and learn about all things OriginTrail. Project One will be specifically tailored to engaging the broader crypto community with a targeted series of initiatives described below. Thus, we don't aim to compete but rather fill in the gaps and complement the hard work Trace Labs is doing on de B2B side.
The OriginTrail community is extremely committed and, I believe, has all the resources, knowledge, and talent to achieve great things. Let's start building! Together.
Yours truly,
Tom Oostewechel (@Boonikad93) and Project One team
Project One
Project One will lay the first foundational bricks towards our mission to build an accessible and open-source knowledge hub for and by the community where they can connect, collaborate, contribute and learn all things OriginTrail.
Team
The project team will consist of the following members:
Tom Oostewechel
Project Management / Design
Jaco Bovenschen
Development
Lu Ku
Freelance Animator
Famous Amos
Advisor / Community
Kirk
Advisor / CommunityDeliverables
Project One aims to deliver the following:
Core Infrastructure
Focused on building out an open-source and future-proof infrastructure, tooling, and guidelines & processes for easy community contribution.
Illustrations
Design high-quality, custom illustrations to convey the purpose of the OriginTrail protocol consistently and simply, and to enhance written (media) content. This deliverable includes:
Community Proposal Fund
With a Community Proposal Fund we can fund our own marketing efforts and all other avenues we as a community would like to pursue. The Community Proposal Fund will be used to obtain donations directly from the community.
To jumpstart the Community Proposal Fund, we are proposing a “Phase 1” donation goal of $10,000.
Soon, every community member will be able to submit a proposal to use these funds to boost awareness and understanding of OriginTrail within the broader crypto ecosystem. The exact proposal workflow and criteria such as funding levels and submission criteria are yet to be determined. We are open to community discussion on this topic!
Some early ideas for extending the reach of the OriginTrail protocol include:
- •Explainer videos
- •KPI dashboard
- •Easy to access database with ‘shillable’ video clips and quotes
- •Templates for social media
- •Promoted articles
- •Social media marketing
- •AMA’s in cryptogroups
Multi-sign wallets
Initially, the multi-sign wallets will be managed by members from the Project One team. The signature policy is setup in such a way that 3 out of 4 owners have to accept any interactions with the assets stored on the wallet. However, when all key infrastructure is built we envision a future where we will gradually move towards a more decentralized governance model, maybe even an OriginTrailDAO?
| (Pseudo) name | Multi-signers |
|---|---|
| Famous Amos |  |
| Tom Oostewechel |  |
| Lu Ku |  |
| Kirk |  |
The multi-sign wallets will be created in Gnosis Safe, which is the most trusted platform to manage digital assets on Ethereum. Gnosis has been developing blockchain-based financial, infrastructure products since 2016. The Gnosis Safe core smart contracts have passed the highest possible security standard in the industry: Formal Verification.
There are currently more than 5,000 Gnosis wallets deployed, with the top 25 instances alone holding a combined volume of 1.4M Ether and more than $1B equivalent in digital assets.
Donate
You can donate to the community proposal fund on the Ethereum, Polygon, xDai or Binance Smart Chain network.
- Ethereum
- Polygon
- xDai
- BSC